Maps and Geographic Information System (GIS) usually involve working with transformations from one format to another. This involves transformation of coordinates delivered by surveyor into a two dimensional (2D) system of a defined map projection.
During the commencement of new infrastructure projects in a city, development companies rely on geo-location coordinates related to assets provided by the town planning department (TPD). With advancement of technology, satellite projections of a particular area or a city or a country and many more can be obtained. Lately, most town planning departments (TPDs) are using a satellite projection system (World Geodetic System 1984 or WGS84) for the geo-location of city assets such as roads, buildings and may other land based assets and as such the geo-location coordinates of assets are represented using the satellite projection system. The reason is to uniform the assets information collection spatial reference to accommodate the surveying data collection techniques such as GPS, GLONASS, GNSS, Laser Scanning, Satellite Images. Such satellite projections vary from the actual terrestrial map obtained on earth, and as a consequence, there is a difference between the satellite and the terrestrial mappings of a particular area.
All services such as utility route approvals, contractor submissions, supply arrangements presented by development companies to the TPDs need to be represented using geo-location coordinates based on the satellite projection system. There is a substantial exchange of information related to the geo-location of assets between the development companies and the municipalities especially in route approvals and drawings update. This highlights the importance of having a consistency in the information exchanged between both parties.
Development companies still use Local/terrestrial projection systems (for example Nahrawan 1967, DTM C Dubai, Cassini Grid and the like) due to several technical issues which results in an inconsistency of the representation of geo-location coordinates of assets between the development companies and the TPD. An inaccurate conversion of asset coordinates from one geo-location system to another (in this case from local/terrestrial geo-location system used by the development companies to the satellite projection system used by the TPD or the opposite) results in mismatches and data discrepancies affecting the accuracy of information related to the location of assets exchanged between the development companies and the TPDs. This affects the chances and/or time frames in obtaining approvals by the development companies from the TPDs such as route approvals, asset development approvals in allocated utility corridors and the such. In this sense, the update of asset information life cycle status from design, commissioning to maintaining will be completely delayed and affected.
Traditional data conversion systems and method from satellite to terrestrial geo-location coordinates use and process rotation coefficients which makes them complex and results in an inaccurate conversion.